Part 24

The Dewburns are expecting promotion to a diplomatic post--possibly Persia. They feel their work here is done, now that the Anglo-German Treaty is ratified and Unguja is a British protectorate. The treaty has had the best effect on Anglo-German relations here and incidentally on my prospects of co-operation. I am to see Wissmann as soon as I land at Medinat-al-Barkah. Eugene Schraeder, who is all-powerful in Anglo-German finance, has written out to him. I have little doubt we shall get a Concession over the Happy Valley for our syndicate.

Landing at Medina will be a little out of the direct route to Irangi, but I shall travel across the Nguru country, now quite pacified and safe, and try to take Hangodi on the way to Ugogo. What associations the sight of it will revive if I do! That halting-place below the great rise, where we had tea together in the shade when I met you in your machila with Halima, and you were so taken aback that you called me "darling"--_I_ haven't forgotten! And talking of Halima, reminds me to say that she sends you her many salaams. Andrade is cook with the Dewburns and Halima has some function as housemaid. I have arranged when the Dewburns go that Andrade is to join me; so when you come out, my darling, Halima shall be there to wait on you and on Maud.

It'll be rather horrid meeting the Bazzards again at Medina. They returned recently from a long holiday in England--an East Coast watering-place chiefly, where Bazzard, who doesn't know a yacht from a barge, got elected to the local Yachting Club. I hear that Mrs. B. looks forward confidently to her husband succeeding Dewburn when the latter is promoted; but I think there is not the slightest chance of it.

The Stotts must have got my letter by now telling them I was on my way. Of course there has been no time for a reply. But Callaway tells me the last news of them was good. I have already picked up quite a third of my Wanyamwezi "faithfuls" who were hanging about Unguja since Willowby Patterne's _safari_ was paid off. That man is a _scoundrel_! He came out here and made free use of my name, pretending even he had letters from me which he never produced. He therefore got favours and concessions and secured my original hundred men--or what was left of them. His tour through the Mvita hinterland was one long sickening path of slaughter: he and his companion--a poor youth who was often down with dysentery and whom Patterne treated brutally--must have killed about three times the amount of game they could use for food or trophies. His ravages even shocked his carnivorous porters and annoyed the natives. Do you know, I think he must have had just a glimmering about the existence of the Happy Valley--he was always following me about at Glen Sporran and cocking an eye at my correspondence. Because though ostensibly only big-game slaughtering they made straight for the _south_ side of Kilimanjaro (instead of keeping to the British Sphere); and when the _safari_ reached Arusha ya Juu he tried to get guides for "Manyara"--the porters swear he used the word. He cross-questioned some of them as to where they had been with you and me. However, fortunately he had an odd trick of getting himself hated by all the native tribes he met, as well as by his own porters, whom he used to flog atrociously. (They tell disgusting stories about these floggings which I cannot put down on paper.) When his caravan got past the slopes of Meru it fell in with "our Masai," as I call them. And then it was like one of the old fairy stories of the bad girl who tried to follow the good girl down the well into fairyland, and couldn't remember the countersign. Instead of hitting it off with the Masai he vexed them in some way and at last they turned on him and forced his _safari_ to go back to Kilimanjaro. At least the Wanyamwezi porters refused to continue the journey, which comes to the same thing. He has left for England--I am glad to say--or I might have fallen foul of him. The two of them killed enough ivory to pay the costs of the whole outfit. So he swears he is coming back again and will then take a large body of armed men with him and wipe out the Masai.

Now I must bring this long letter to a close. Much love to dear old Maud, and my most respectful greetings to my cousin and late employer. I found her fame for beauty, wit, and dominance over Society had reached even to Unguja.... In fact I rather winced at turning over three-months-old illustrated papers here and seeing pictures of her in wonderful costumes or--in the magazines--as a type of English beauty.... How far away it all seems!...

Your loving RODGE.

_From the same to the same._

German Headquarters, Medinat-al-Barka, _April_ 30, 1891.

DEAREST,--

You will be rather surprised that a month has gone by and I have got no nearer my goal than this! But firstly I went down with a bad go of fever--all right now--and secondly I could not hustle von Wissmann, who is Imperial Commissioner here and who has been very kind--and thirdly the rains are so appalling just now that overland travelling is well-nigh impossible till the country dries up a little. But I am not losing my time otherwise. I am getting everything fixed up with the Germans, and next shall only have to arrive at an understanding with the natives. The boundaries of our Concession (which will include the Stotts) cover the Happy Valley from the water-parting between the Bubu and the Kwou on the south to the escarpment at the north end of the lake, and on east and west include all the water-shed of Lake Manyara, Iraku and Fiome. So they have dealt with us generously.

Wissmann I like immensely. He is a great man and has the interests of the real natives thoroughly at heart. Our old friends the Stotts have impressed him favourably and they are to be woven into my schemes of development. Wissmann from the first asked me to put up at his headquarters and treated me like a colleague in the opening up of Africa. So I was saved the disagreeableness of staying at my former Consulate with the Bazzards.

Mrs. Bazzard has been sickly in her protestations of friendship, utterly insincere as you know. I fancy she is turning her pen now on Sir Godfrey, in the hope she may oust _him_. Considering how kind the Dewburns were to them it is odious to note how she tries to disparage him....

There is not much news from the interior. I hear that Ali-bin-Ferhani got rewarded by the Germans for saving Hangodi Station, and that Mbogo is still chief there in name, the real chief of the district being Ann Anderson, or Mgozimke--"The man-woman," as the natives call her.

In haste to catch the mail....

Your loving ROGER.

_From the same to the same._

Mwada, The Happy Valley, _July_ 28, 1891.

MY OWN DEAR WIFE,--

I reached the shores of the lake--which I now find is called Lawa ya mweri--and the end of the Happy Valley on--as near as I can reckon--June 20. (The Stotts have no almanacs and are quite indifferent to dates, times, seasons; they live under some enchantment, they tell me, since they came here, like the legends of people carried off to Fairyland.) I met Mr. Stott at Burungi, which now looks a flourishing station. The Wagogo seem to me quite recalcitrant to Christianity, but the Stotts have to keep this up as a depot for their traffic with the coast, and they are helped in this by the German Government.... Stott and I journeyed together through the Irangi country almost in state. The Stotts have become enormously popular as "medicine men." They have stopped epidemics of small-pox by vaccinating the people, have shown them how to stay the ravages of the burrowing fleas, and they are making a dead set against infanticide, having found one or two leading chiefs sufficiently intelligent to appreciate the importance of a large population. Formerly, as you may remember, there was such a prejudice against female babies that they were often exposed to the hyenas outside the tembe, and all children who came into the world by an irregular presentation, or with a tooth already through the gum, likewise all twins, were either thrown into the lake or abandoned to the carnivorous ants or prowling carnivores. (There is a curious legend here--Stott says--that sometimes these unhappy infants were picked up by female baboons of the Chakma type and nursed by them with their own offspring.)

Well: you can imagine, having lived already in these parts, what the infant death-rate amounted to. But the local chiefs having had the whole theory exposed to them have sanctioned a crusade against infanticide for any reason. The Wa-rangi have further been persuaded to abandon the custom of burning alive women suspected of adultery. I did not like to tell you at the time, but as we passed through the Irangi country in November, '88, they were actually killing unfortunate women in this manner. They believe that if a man goes out hunting and makes a bad miss in throwing his spear or assegai at an elephant it is because his wife is untrue to him at home! So when he returns from the chase his wretched spouse is trussed up and bound to the top of a great pile of brushwood.

Consequently, at several of the Irangi villages on our way up the Bubu valley the women who were the wives of sporting duffers came out in deputations to dance round the worthy Stott till they quite embarrassed him; especially as the dances were of an indelicate nature.

The Stotts have now quite a nice-looking station to the south-east of the main lake, on a grassy rise with the Mburu river on the south and a much smaller salt lake on the east. This looks like sparkling ice under the sun and is nearly solid--? salt--? soda. Its borders seem to be a kind of salt lick for the game which is once more swarming and singularly tame. There are no rhinos, fortunately, and the tricky tempered elephants and buffaloes prefer the wooded regions farther north and west. The lions, leopards and chitas are so glutted with food that they leave the domestic cattle and human beings alone; and the myriad zebras, antelopes, elands, bushbuck, giraffes, wart-hogs and ostriches are quite willing to live at peace with mankind. Secretary birds and saddle-billed storks are numerous and keep the snakes down; marabou storks and vultures devour all the carrion and even the filth round the native villages--so the country seems healthy. Enormous flocks of crowned cranes and bustards look after the locusts and grasshoppers. The flamingoes by the lake shore are as numerous as they were in our time....

The Stotts' station is built after the fashion of the native houses of the district: long, continuous, one-storied "tembes" forming a hollow square, inside which the cattle and sheep are kept at night....

But what I am longing to describe is the country of Iraku. I went there with Stott, you may remember, whilst we stayed waiting for news of poor John Barnes. I was immensely taken with it then. But now I have seen it more in detail I am enthusiastic. It resembles--I can't help saying--a little Abyssinia--from all I have heard and read of Abyssinia, though it is not at such great altitudes. Its natives are actually related in speech and type to those of Southern Abyssinia. I should estimate the average height at five thousand feet, with ridges, peaks and craters touching seven or eight thousand; so that the temperature is almost perfect--nights always cool, not to say cold. It is a fertile, fruitful land of ups and downs, richly forested valleys, plenty of streams, grassy uplands like the Berkshire downs: indeed a very English-looking country. Somewhere here, not far from the escarpment and the Happy Valley, we will have our home, dearest, and here you and Maud shall join me as soon as ever you can come out. How I _long_ for that coming. There are times when, in spite of the Stotts and their cheeriness, I feel sick with melancholy and loneliness. The change from that English life has been too abrupt. As soon as ever little Maud is weaned and able to be left with your mother you must pack up and come. My Agents in the City, Messrs. Troubridge, who pay you (I hope) your allowance quarterly, have all my instructions as to your passage, and Maud's, your outfit, etc. Once I can get you two out here I shall settle down contentedly enough and make a fortune--I doubt not--on which, some day, we can retire and live happily ever afterwards.

Meantime as I have written very fully, only show this letter to Maud and say as little as possible about it to Sibyl, lest she repeat my account of the Happy Valley to that scoundrel, Patterne. She says she never sees him now, and she certainly ought not to after the reputation he has left behind in East Africa; but as likely as not she will resume the acquaintance, and he is the last sort of person I wish to meet in these parts.... Mrs. Stott of course sends love to you and the kindest greetings. Her enthusiasm for her Creator is unabated, because they have so far had wonderful good fortune since they blundered into this haven of rest and beauty in October, 1888. If one or other of them did not have once in a way to go down to the coast they would enjoy--she says--perfect health....

Your loving ROGER.

*CHAPTER XVIII*

*FIVE YEARS LATER*

Roger Brentham has now lived consecutively for five years in the Happy Valley; or, to be accurate, at Magara, in a natural fortress looking down on it from the Iraku escarpment. Much of his work, however, lies in the plains below, and he has a comfortable rest-house near the Stotts' station--but not too near, for Kaya la Balalo[#]--as they have named it--is now the centre of a considerable native village, a little too noisy, dusty, and smelly for fastidious nerves and noses.

[#] "The City of God."

In these five years a great transformation has taken place in and around the Happy Valley. A land settlement has been come to with the natives and is duly laid down in a rough survey and in signed documents drawn up in German and Swahili. The native villages, plantations, pasture ground and reserves are clearly defined so that they may be placed outside the scope of white encroachment; but in coming to this agreement, some common-sense regard has been had for highly mineralized land not already inhabited and suitable for profitable exploitation (with a share of the profits going to the native community) and for the location of European settlements, farms, mission stations, laboratories and experimental plantations. In short, both parties are satisfied. There is sufficient security for the investment of much white capital in this region of undeveloped wealth; and the Negroes are reassured regarding their homes and future prospects of expansion. They have been shrewd bargainers and have had the Stotts as their advocates. The news of their fair and even generous treatment has attracted considerable native immigration, especially from the Nyamwezi countries; Brentham's Wa-nyamwezi porters have been useful recruiting agents, and the district is well off for labour. The native chiefs administer rough justice as between native and native. Brentham and three of his German colleagues, as well as Mr. Ewart Stott, hold commissions from the German Government as justices of the peace, and there is a German commandant at a central post in the Irangi country who presides over a Court of Appeal from their decisions. But as a rule, these Concessionaires having originally inspired confidence in von Wissmann's mind during his great pacification of German East Africa are left pretty free to administer the area of their large Concession and to keep order within its limits. This, with the cordial co-operation of the native chiefs they find comparatively easy, and in this the friendship between Roger and the outlying Masai tribes, who have not forgotten the blood-brotherhood of 1888 has been very useful. The Happy Valley has nothing to fear from Masai raids and has at present no outside enemies.

Lucy and Maud joined Roger in the spring of 1892 and after four years' happy life in this curiously secluded region--so cut off as it was from African troubles, from wars between Arabs and Europeans raids of tribe upon tribe, risings against the Germans, squabbles with British pioneers--are now preparing to return to England. Lucy has had two more children one born in 1893 and the other in 1895. She is anxious to take them both home and place them in safety there; at the same time she hungers for a sight of the older two whom she has not seen for over four years. She is in fact a prey to that divided allegiance which has so often marred the happiness of the wives of men engaged in Indian or African work: a desire to be with their husbands, and yet an anxiety about the health and bringing-up of their children in a barbaric environment. The Stotts consider they have solved this question by parting with their oldest child and letting their other children run the African risks and grow up--if they survive--with only an African outlook. They are true colonists in intention. But settlers like the Brenthams always envisage an eventual retreat to the home country and an English education for their children.

They are assembled on the open ground beyond the garden of their house in Iraku, to take leave of their German associates in the Concession: Herr Treuherz Hildebrandt (whose sentimental fore-name is usually disguised under the initial T) and Dr. Wolfgang Wiese. Hildebrandt is the mining engineer who is ascertaining the mineral wealth of the mountain region bordering on the Happy Valley; Dr. Wiese, besides being in case of need the physician and surgeon of the little European community, is a very clever analytical chemist, botanist, zoologist and horticulturist, one of those all-round men that Germany so often produced before the war and so often contributed in still earlier days to the opening up of the British Empire. He has arrived in haste from his dwelling a mile distant to bid farewell to the gracious Mrs. Brentham. Wiese is spectacled and bearded, a little shy in manner with strangers, and inclined to melancholy when his thoughts turn to the young wife who accompanied him to Africa about the time that Lucy and Maud came out to join husband and brother. Less fortunate than they, she had died from an attack of coast fever. Thereafter he had found some mitigation of his loneliness in the pleasant home created by Lucy and Maud, so that he regards them with affection and thinks they must be the very best type of British women. As, however, he has work in progress at his laboratory of crucial importance, his farewells are prompt and soon concluded.

But his colleague, the mining engineer Hildebrandt, stays longer, being very loath to part with Maud Brentham. He is tall, passably handsome, soldierly, well-knit, a lint-white blond with violet-grey eyes like Lucy's. Though he comes from Saxony he is more of the Friesland type, in the contrast between his straw-yellow hair (mostly shaved to stubble, it is true) and his dark-grey eyes. He has the further attraction to which many women would succumb in being very musical (out of business hours). In those days before gramophones he was a welcome guest for the music which welled up in his brain and poured from his fingers. Roger had managed with infinite difficulty to import and carry up on an ox-cart a cottage piano of German make, and on this instrument Hildebrandt would waft his listeners to other scenes--of far away and long ago--with his waltzes, sonatas, minuets, marches, and songs without words, sometimes playing by ear with that wonderful musician's memory; sometimes, when he took things seriously, from the enormous supply of printed music which a sympathetic company had allowed him to carry up-country.

A year after their first meeting he had proposed to Maud, and had renewed this offer of marriage on two other occasions. But she had been firm in her refusal, though she appreciated his good looks and frank manliness, and almost loved him for his music. But she declared the difference in their ages--twelve years--was an insuperable objection; secondly she did not wish to marry, so that she might always live with Roger and Lucy and their children. If they failed her she would make a career of her own--become a New Woman and agitate for women's rights. "On top of all that, nothing would induce me to live in Germany, though I've no doubt you are in the right, and it's the finest country in the world. But I'm so interested in watching English developments. When we have finished with Africa and made our pile we're going to settle at home and improve our own country."

"Well then, if you'll marry me, I'll go and live in England with you...."

But Maud has remained obdurate. In spite of this they have settled down in course of time, and in battling together against the anxieties, difficulties, and dangers of African colonization, into very good comrades. Maud and Roger and even Lucy all speak German to some extent, and the Germans of the Concession have an even greater facility in English. Conversation is often a medley of both languages and much laughter at each other's mistakes. Lucy contributes to the common stock of entertainment very little in the way of talent. She is naturally fond of music: sweet melodies, deep harmonies bring the tears into her eyes; gay tunes make her want to dance; but she is no musician and no dancer. Maud has a pleasant contralto voice and is a good accompanist. Lucy's water-colour painting has long since been given up as a futility in this age of universal talent. But she makes botanical collections now with some deftness and ability under the instruction of Dr. Wiese, whom in this direction she really helps. Yet considering she has borne four healthy children in six years of marriage no one can ask much from her in the way of accomplishment in the arts; and by the time she has attended to her offspring's needs with the perfunctory help of Halima--herself saddled with two brown hybrids, bearing extravagant Portuguese names--mended their clothes and her husband's, and her own, and generally directed the housekeeping, it is felt she has done her duty to the little community. Nevertheless though she is not particularly witty, original, or wise, and has no great physical attraction for any one but her husband, and is prone at times to be silent with a gentle melancholy, she has an inherent gift for making people feel at home. She has a capacity for listening unweariedly to the longest stories, and is a sympathetic confidant to any one in trouble.

So Bergwerksingenieur Hildebrandt said good-bye to her with nearly as much sentiment as infused his voice and his hand-grip when he took leave of his liebste Kamerad, "Meess Mowd" (Maud always said that his pronunciation of her name robbed his courtship of all romance). He looks indeed so sad at parting from these two dear Englishwomen that Maud is nearly tempted to kiss him; only that he might have misconstrued her motherliness.